$200,000 As the New Black, Or How the Other 92.5 Percent Lives

It may not rise to the level of the kind of Sunday Styles article that makes you want to flee New York, but it’s almost as obnoxious. “Six Figures? Not Enough!”:

There was a time not long ago when earning six figures was a significant milestone among upwardly mobile professionals. If you were young and single in one of the nation’s big cities, you could live in a building with a doorman, drive a European car, eat at fine restaurants and vacation in Jackson Hole. For married people it meant a suburban home and college savings accounts for the children.

Beyond the lifestyle, $100,000 was a psychic achievement; it meant joining the meritocratic elite. The prospect of “six figures” kept white-collar workers toiling for 20 years, confident that hard work would be rewarded and that the American social contract was securely in place.

Certainly $100,000, which is more than twice the national median household income of $43,527, is still a princely wage in most of the country, placing you in the top 5.2 percent of American wage earners with full-time jobs, according to the 2000 census. Even in New York City, only 7.5 percent of full-time workers make that much. But $100,000 isn’t what it used to be. It has been devalued, in the practical sense by inflation and psychologically because it is now a relatively common salary for newcomers in fields like law and banking. For today’s executive strivers in the more affluent cities, there is a new grail: $200,000.

When you read these sort of Sunday Styles articles, you inevitably wonder who these people are; it seems that everyone but you (and the writer) are in on the joke. But now we know — these articles are aimed at only 7.5 percent of the city. It’s then that you realize that the article is riding that thin line between obnoxious and mocking. And this time we’re on the safe side of mockery! See in particular:

“It’s the new black,” said Bill Coleman, senior vice president in charge of compensation at Salary.com, an online career service based in Needham, Mass., that tracks executive pay. “There’s a lot of bunching between $100,000 and $150,000. That’s the vast majority of the people who used to aspire to $100,000. Now they are aspiring to $200,000 or $250,000.”

“It’s the players,” he added, echoing a common sentiment, “who make $200,000.”

Where does the money go? It’s easy:

Adjusted for cost-of-living inflation in the New York metropolitan region, a $100,000 income in 1987 would be worth about $170,000 today. And yet it still seems that another $30,000 or more is needed to be a “player.” Part of the explanation may be the almost perverse escalation in the price of commodities favored by upwardly mobile professionals: whether $170 Diesel jeans, which have replaced $30 Levis; $3.95 lattes from Starbucks versus 25-cent coffee from a deli; or the must-have $449 iPod that supplanted the must-have $75 Sony Walkman of the Reagan years.

To think that people once paid $75 for a Walkman — it just boggles the mind. And with that I’ll slink back into the humdrum hand-to-mouth existence of the other 92.5 percent of the city . . .

Closing the Gates

As the snow comes down, workers are apparently dismantling Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates, which closed yesterday:

Art is long, and life is short, and city contracts are even shorter. The dismantling of the 7,500 gates was to start first thing today, and, Jeanne-Claude said, in keeping with her and Christo’s agreement with the city, it all has to be gone by March 15. That schedule is fine with her. February was the only month the project would work, she said, when the trees are leafless and row upon row of color can be seen in every direction.

The dismantling will be easier than the installation because there will not be any need to be careful. The 5,290 tons of steel will be melted down and recycled – “The aluminum is going to become cans of soda,” Jeanne-Claude says – and the fabric will be shredded and turned into carpet padding. Then all that will be left of “The Gates” will be the memories, and the T-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, watches and baseball caps.

Typical Times color describing the scene yesterday:

It was a bright sunny morning, but cold, and the park was crowded, considering the weather. There were the usual joggers, cyclists and Chinese wedding ceremonies, but also, of course, the New Yorkers and tourists coming for a first or last look.

Everywhere she walked, Jeanne-Claude was followed by a constant stream of thank yous and butchered mercis.

Shoot That Groundhog

I kind of love the Post articles about the weather. “Bundle Up For a Wintry Weekend,” they warn today:

The snowstorm may be over, but don’t look for any spring-like weather this weekend.

Or next week, either.

Temperatures will hover around the freezing mark today and tomorrow, with northwest winds of 5 to 10 mph making the air feel like it’s in the 20s.

There will also be a chance of snow flurries during the day tomorrow.

Sunday morning will be sunny, but clouds will roll in by afternoon. Highs for the day will be in the upper 30s.

The National Weather Service says Monday could be a mess, with a 40 percent chance of rain or snow in the afternoon and into the evening, and the thermometer stuck in the low 30s.

It’s the same forecast for Tuesday. The first break New Yorkers can expect will be Thursday, when Mother Nature will treat the city to a high of 40 degrees. But don’t get used to it.

AccuWeather’s long-range forecast calls for next weekend to be lousy as well, with a chance of snow and rain zapping the Big Apple.

There’s even a byline for this story, which basically amounts to the weather on the evening news. Who gets this job? All it is is turning a forecast into paragraph format. I love it.

Speaking of the evening news, our favorite weatherman, Channel 7’s Sam Champion, had the best line last night as the snow was coming down: “Shoot that groundhog.” Boo yah!

Did you know that Sam Champion has an indie band named after him? They even outgoogle him. That doesn’t seem right.

Admit It: Central Park Sucks!

More Gates-related opinion, this time from the New York Observer’s Hilton Kramer, who is predictably crabby:

My own view is that the gates are nothing less than an unforgivable defacement of a public treasure, and everyone responsible for promoting it—including our publicity-seeking Mayor—should be held accountable, not only for supporting bad taste but for violating public trust.

What has to be understood about this whole affair is that it’s not only an assault on nature, but also the wanton desecration of a precious work of art. After all, Central Park is the creation of two of the greatest landscape artists in our history—Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux—and it’s entitled to the kind of care and protection that civilized societies normally accord to works of art that belong to the community. If some barbarian entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art and proceeded to drape orange banners on the paintings and sculptures, we can be sure that the police would be called in to halt such a flagrant violation of a treasured art collection.

With sincere apologies to Joe Queenan (whose [blank] Sucks! series of articles in Spy Magazine were some of the funniest things I’ve ever read and remember), I want to clear up something that I’ve been saving up for a while: Face it, Central Park Sucks.

This is not to say that it’s not a lovely place, a treasured oasis in the middle of a busy city, a stunning achievement of design and reinterpretation of nature, or what-have-you. It’s just that sometimes I question whether it’s really the “big, beautiful canvas” folks like Hilton Kramer constantly say it is.

Let’s review:

It’s certainly overexposed; try finding some solace for contemplative communing with so-called nature there on one of a handful of pleasant spring or summer days. You can’t. Even in New York there are more pleasant natural settings to “get away from it all.”

As a stunning achievement in landscape design, I don’t think it’s a myth that Olmsted and Vaux preferred their design for Prospect Park to the earlier Central Park. (I will gladly revise this if it turns out this isn’t the case; I’ve heard it so often that I believe it’s true.) Sure, you move through the formalism of the park’s southern end towards the untrammeled beauty of the Ramble; big fucking deal — Van Cortlandt Park, for example, is basically the same thing! Plus there are those absurd transverse roads that cut up the “genius design.” A revolution in traffic flow, but not exactly picturesque. And that gaudy Belvedere Castle — come on! A model boat pond — please! Statuary to well-known greats like Giuseppe Mazzini — what exactly does he have to do with Central Park? Nothing! And don’t even get me started on Sir Walter Scott or noted Confederate gynecologist James Marion Sims. Face it, this park was “defaced” long before Christo and Jeanne-Claude got to it.

For all Kramer’s righteous indignance over the “precious work of art” that is Central Park, he is perhaps forgetting the myriad transgressions perpetrated on it over the years. I’ll take fifty years of Gates before another crappy-ass ice skating rink, volleyball court, baseball field or playground — not to mention the yearly commercialization of Summerstage concerts in the park. If Olmsted and Vaux could see it today, I’m sure they wouldn’t take too kindly the encroachment on their “design.” Which is to say, it’s a fucking park, dude — it’s meant to be used! I have to say, I don’t really care whether there are five more places for lawn bowling (think about that violation of “democratic ideals” for a second there). Parks are meant to be inhabited. Even by dog runs! Call it what you want, but it’s far from a painting in the Met.

From stoners lighting up in Sheep Meadow to the used condoms in the Ramble to the countless movie crews restricting access to the cabs speeding down the drive to the hippies playing bad folk music at Strawberry Fields to the parasitic vendors to the crowds, crowds, CROWDS, the park is not all it’s made out to be. Face it, Central Park Sucks!

(Again, apologies to Joe Queenan, but I’m typing quickly here.)

By way of a bonus, here are Excerpts from Queenan’s piece, posted on a newsgroup back in 1993 (I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it’s basically what I remember):

With one or two exceptions – Coltrane, Miles – jazz is an art form that has always been dominated by fat old men in sunglasses and ridiculous suits playing songs with names like “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” and “Epistrophy.” And talk about role models: The most famous jazz musician of them all was a tubby old trumpet player who ended up singing “Hello, Dolly!” with Streisand while wiping his forehead with a soggy hankerchief like some lard-butt umpire at Wrigley Field on Nickel Beer Night. The second-most famous jazz musician was a self-anointed duke who wrote ghastly songs like “Satin Doll.” The third-most-famous jazz musician was an emaciated junkie who used to play with his back to the audience and occasionally sprayed the folks in the front row while spitting into his instrument. The list of deadbeats goes on and on. Stan Getz? Junkie. Chet Baker? Junkie. Charlie Parker? Junkie. Oscar Peterson? Fat, old, boring ivory-tinkler.

I wish, wish, wish someone would reprint these essays somewhere! “Greenmarkets Suck” was another hilarious one.

The Color Saffron

Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s dirty secret emerges — The Gates aren’t really “saffron”:

When it comes to art and food, everyone is a critic.

That’s the case with “The Gates,” the public art snaking through 23 miles of Central Park through Sunday. The artists who produced this series of flags, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, say it is the color of saffron. New Yorkers who know their way around a kitchen disagree.

“Saffron produces a golden color, like a taxicab,” said Ed Schoenfeld, a restaurant consultant and an expert cook who lives in Brooklyn. Like many other cooks, he was surprised that the artists called the fabric saffron. “This color is orange – more like a persimmon than saffron,” he said.

To the cook, saffron is the color of Provençal bouillabaisse, Milanese risotto, and Indian shrikhand.

It is not the color of a crossing guard’s safety vest.

It makes a difference when chefs are charged with devising saffron-related dishes to complement the event:

Not that a color correction would matter much in some New York restaurants, where any promotion in February can seem like a good idea. NYC & Company, a publicly financed organization that promotes the city, has encouraged restaurants to develop special saffron menus in honor of “The Gates.”

But a dish made golden with saffron does not look much like a “Gate.” So at Bolo, for instance, the chef de cuisine, Dan Mihalko, had to add carrots to his saffron sauce to produce the right color.

Bill Yosses, the chef at Josephs, runs his saffron Pavlova under the broiler to add some toasty hues to the meringue. “It’s the real saffron color – it’s yellow orange,” he said.

At Django the chef Cedric Tovar did his best to make the promotion work, though he said he does not understand the relationship between “The Gates” and the spice, or even between public art and his kitchen.

Still, he soldiered on. He put a bouillabaisse with saffron on the menu, then added an appetizer of grilled stuffed squid punched up with a sauce of piquillo peppers, vinegar and olive oil. The sauce, he says, is orange. And saffron-free.

“I guess the color is what they want,” he said. “I haven’t seen ‘The Gates’ myself.”

And with that, I see the true genius behind Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Just when you’re sick to death of reading about their installations, they’re over. Can I say it? I will: Please, Lord, make it stop! (And, God willing, Sunday it should!)