New york

Thursday

Taki

High life | 11 October 2018

Gstaad   The bells are ringing, the bells are ringing, ding dong, ding dong. The cows are down from up high, where they’ve been grazing since spring. I look at them from my window and they stare back. I love hearing cowbells day and night. Their sound accompanies me as I hit the makiwara. I like it best when the cows cosy up and examine me up close. They have a complete absence of expression: no emotion, no curiosity, serene. The one that grazes just outside my window I call Emily, and she has even more tsuki no kokoro — ‘mind like the moon’ in karate parlance — than the

Wednesday

Taki

High life | 13 December 2017

It’s that time of year again. Yippee! And get your wallets out. Scrooges are no longer tolerated at Christmas, although once upon a time people were so fed up with the annual Christmas shakedown that in 1419 London biggies ruled that Christmas solicitations were banned. Servants, apprentices, tradesmen and churchmen had all become professional supplicants, and were not best pleased by the ukase. But as someone once said, it is better to give than to receive, so there. We now give to doormen, barbers, hairdressers, garage attendants, lift operators, building supers, postmen and rich tiny children with hands outstretched. You name it, they expect it. And let us not forget

Thursday

Brian Martin

Not for the fainthearted

In 2014 Michael Alig, impresario, party promoter and drug provider, was released on parole after 17 years in prison for the manslaughter of Angel Melendez. Alig, leader of New York’s Club Kids during the 1980s and early 1990s, features as a minor character in Jarett Kobek’s breakneck, crazed ride through NYC’s nightlife from 1986 to 1996. Although the novel is set in the club and drug scene, filled with addicts, gays, trans, queens and freaked-out weirdos, its main themes are serious and compassionate. Repeated constantly is the mantra that history repeats itself; but most important is the theme of enduring friendship. Despite the decadence, Kobek is optimistic. The two protagonists

Monday

Robert Adès

Boozing and bitching with Germaine Greer: David Plante’s Difficult Women revisited

Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three  David Plante New York Review of Books Classics, 2017, £10.99 Worlds Apart: A Memoir David Plante Bloomsbury, 2016, £10.99 Becoming a Londoner: A Diary David Plante Bloomsbury, 2014, £9.99 The novelist David Plante has been keeping a diary of his life since 1959. Now running to many millions of words, it covers several decades of literary and artistic life in London and Europe, and is archived every few years in the New York Public Library. His first foray into its publication came early, too early, with Difficult Women in 1983. Now, following closely after Becoming a Londoner and Worlds Apart, two substantial volumes covering the 70s and

Thursday

Taki

High life | 16 November 2017

What is left to say after the church shooting in the Home of the Depraved? Those killed in Texas included a toddler, several children and eight members of one family at prayer. It is almost too hard to fathom. I’ve been here for six weeks and three mass-murder sprees have taken place, two perpetrated by deranged male shooters, the other by a disciple of Allah from Uzbekistan, who unfortunately survived a cop’s bullet and demanded an Isis flag be raised in his hospital room. Nice. At least that ghastly man Jann Wenner has not plastered the Uzbek scumbag on the cover of Rolling Stone. After the Boston marathon massacre, he

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Security overkill is terror’s real triumph

The moment the news broke on Halloween that an Uzbek in a rental truck had just killed eight people on New York’s West Side cycle path, my heart sank. Now, you might think that any decent human being — I marginally qualify — would be profoundly saddened by the pointless murder of folks merely out enjoying a city’s recreational facilities on a crisp autumn day. But that wasn’t it. Or you might think — since I spend a fair whack of the year in New York, where as usual I get everywhere by bike — that I might be concerned about becoming a terrorist target myself. I use that bike

Thursday

Taki

High life | 26 October 2017

I hate to say this, but the quality of life in the Bagel has crashed in a Harvey Weinstein-like way. The city has always had a sort of rollercoaster feel, its ups and downs driven by Wall Street and budget cuts, but its present state is the worst I’ve experienced by far. When I first came to New York, it was the true centre of the world. It was after the war and Europe was in ruins. What glamour there was in the world resided in the city. People dressed to the nines, women wore hats and gloves, and manners were far more important than money. It was a feast

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Raw materials

‘Art by its very essence is of the new… There is only one healthy diet for artistic creation: permanent revolution.’ Jean Dubuffet wrote those words in 1963, and when Jean-Michel Basquiat burst on to the New York art scene 20 years later — barely out of his teens, untrained and black — he seemed to embody them. Together with his friend Al Diaz, he had grabbed attention in the late 1970s with a campaign of cryptic graffiti signed SAMO© targeted on the SoHo gallery district. Born to middle-class Haitian-Puerto Rican parents in the South Bronx, Basquiat didn’t waste time tagging trains. He knew the value of location; his dad was

Alex Clark

On the waterfront | 12 October 2017

Much has been made of the American novelist Jennifer Egan’s mutation, in her latest novel, from purveyor of metafiction and fragmentary, experimental narratives to creator of a solid piece of traditional realism. Manhattan Beach tells the story of a father and daughter in New York in the years in and around the second world war: Eddie is a mobster’s bagman, who disappears without apparent trace early on; Anna is left distraught, but is also a resilient striver, growing up to become the only female diver in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard. Betwixt and between them stands Dexter Styles, a nightclub owner and instrument of the mafia, swishing between cold malfeasance and a

Thursday

Tim Martin

Madness in Manhattan

Life has far more imagination than we do, says the epigraph from Truffaut that opens Salman Rushdie’s 12th novel — as though, these days, anyone needed reminding. Set in New York and running between the start of the Obama administration and the rise of Trump, this book about gangsterism, art, dynastic ambition, secret identities and the tragedy of plan-making charts the descent of America into satire-killing oddity and social danger as it follows the lives of the Goldens, a family of larger-than-life Indian squillionaires who come to live in Manhattan in the wake of the 2008 Bombay terror attacks. The Goldens are Nero, a Gatsbyish businessman whose past and business

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

The listening project

As Classic FM celebrated its quarter-century on Wednesday with not a recording but a live broadcast of a concert from Dumfries House in Scotland — Bach, Mendelssohn, Chopin and Liszt, and the première of a specially commissioned work by the Welsh composer Paul Mealor — Radio 3 has upped the ante by announcing an autumn schedule that promises to be ‘an antidote to today’s often frenzied world’. Its new programming ranges from a special opera season and a series of organ and choral music to ‘an immersive audio impression’ of what it feels like to hang vertically on the side of a mountain, wind whistling through the ears, feet teetering

Thursday

Ian Sansom

A choice of first novels | 3 August 2017

Remember Douglas Coupland? Remember Tama Janowitz? Remember Lisa St Aubin de Terán? Banana Yoshimoto? Françoise Sagan? The voice of your generation? (If you’ve forgotten the voice of your generation, the brilliant Christopher Fowler’s forthcoming The Book of Forgotten Authors will provide you with the necessary reminder. The voice of my generation, as far as I’m able to recall, was a poet called Attila the Stockbroker, who we used to go and see perform in Harlow, and who did an excellent Peel session. Whatever the hell happened to Attila the Stockbroker?) Three new debut novels might all properly be acclaimed as representing the voice of their generation — though who knows,

Thursday

Ian Sansom

… trailing strands in all directions

Letters of Intent — letters of the intense. Keen readers of Cynthia Ozick (are there any other kind?) will of course already have copies of the books from which these often fiery essays have been selected. There’s a broad range of work represented here, from personal essays through to Ozick’s often rather profound philosophical enquiries into the meaning of art and religion — though the inclusion of no fewer than five essays on Henry James, two on Kafka, two on Virginia Woolf and two on Saul Bellow might make one wish for a little more breathing room, a little more room to roam. But this is a quibble. This is

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Salt-beef delirium

Katz’s Delicatessen, established 1888, is a theme park of Jewish-American food, with tribute gift shop, on the lower east side of Manhattan. There is nowhere more Jewish than Katz’s except Haredi Brooklyn, but if you go there you don’t come back. Katz’s offers a gentler Jewish experience, if you can conceive of such a thing, or it at least attempts it; it offers a kind of Judaism you can enjoy over lunch, which I find amazing because I have never managed it. (No one, for instance, talks about the Holocaust in Katz’s, not because they don’t want to but because they can’t. Try saying Treblinka with a dumpling in your

Thursday

Martin Gayford

American quartet

Politics and art can make for an awkward mix. Much more than with religious subjects it seems to matter whether the viewer shares the artist’s beliefs. But whatever you think of Richard M. Nixon, it would be hard not to enjoy Philip Guston’s satirical drawings of him and his cronies at Hauser & Wirth, Savile Row. These were the most exuberant, scatological, obsessive and imaginative such works since 1937 when Picasso produced an extraordinary strip-cartoon vilification and lampoon entitled ‘The Dream and Lie of Franco’. Indeed, the two series have a good deal in common. Picasso portrayed the Generalissimo as a sort of obscene, moustachioed set of bagpipes. Similarly, Guston

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Building block | 8 June 2017

Liverpool is the New York of Europe. The business district looks like old Wall Street: a miniature Lower Manhattan on the Mersey. It’s a city of scale, drama, melodrama, tragedy and comedy. Not to mention rich and poor. And often all these effects are simultaneous. No other British city has a similarly contrary architectural character: superb, shabby, romantic, melancholy, proud and mean. You cannot be in Liverpool and not be affected by its buildings. I grew up there and long before I knew what ‘design’ meant, Liverpool had taught me to see — as well as to feel the deadly weight of history. It’s an architectural education. But Liverpool has

Taki

High life | 8 June 2017

New York   Main Street is a place, but it’s mostly an idea. It’s where locally owned shops sell stuff to hard-working townies, as we used to call the locals back when I was at boarding school. The townies had dependable blue-collar jobs in auto plants and coalmines. Their sons played American football hard, cut their hair short, and married their high-school sweethearts. I went back to my old school recently with my old buddy Tony Maltese, a wrestler who never lost a match. We had a nostalgic lunch with the wrestling coach and talked about old times. The feeling was one of community and of having control over your

Kate Chisholm

Diary stories

By chance on Saturday morning, I tuned into Radio 4 and heard Professor Clare Brant talking on Saturday Live about Dear Diary, a new exhibition at Somerset House in London that celebrates the art of writing a daily journal. It caught my ear because diaries are such a crucial tool for the biographer yet whenever I’ve attempted to write my own it’s always turned out dreadfully narcissistic and infinitely boring. What, asked Richard Coles, makes diaries so fascinating? It’s all in the detail, said Brant. The way reading a diary can take us into another person’s world, not the outward gloss and grandeur but right inside the way the diarist

Stephen Bayley

The bridge of size

Before Brooklyn exceeded it in cool, Manhattanites spoke dismissively of BNTs. These were the Bridge ‘n’ Tunnel folk, the out-of-towners who needed civil engineering to help them reach social nirvana. The ambitious critic Norman Podhoretz, a master of self-invention, was one such. His notorious Making It (1967) begins: ‘One of the longest journeys in the world is… from Brooklyn to Manhattan.’ But since 1883 the journey over the East River has only been 5,989 feet, although physical distance was not the measure that pained Podhoretz. That’s the total length of Washington Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge, the first connection between the outer boroughs and the elite ‘New York’. It was, and remains,

Thursday

Rod Liddle

PWR BTTM: Pageant

How about some queercore garage punk? PWR BTTM — the name means something empowering to do with buggery — are a young, gay, two-piece band from New York State who live apparently hectic lives. Their new album, Pageant, was released last week and a couple of days later they were kicked off their record label and current tour after allegations of sexual predation were made against the pantomimely camp singer, Ben Hopkins. The greatest surprise was that the complaints came from a woman. Their career is now in limbo. Hopkins denies the allegations, of course, claiming that he is a consensual and democratic kind of chap. But it’s all rather