April 29, 2023
The highest point on the Upper East Side is the penthouse of a 50-story silver atrocity on Lexington and 88th. I live on the same street and can see the penthouse from my apartment, looming, as my sister says, “like the Eye of Sauron.”
This week I was invited to a party in the penthouse. My ears pop on the ride up the elevator. X is already there, drinking champagne, and we realize, after snooping around, that this is actually Kendall Roy’s apartment from Succession. It just hit the market for $29 million but is right now being used by Fendi for this thing.
It’s a caricature of a New York fashion party. Everyone wears black, smokes an e-cigarette, and looks extremely unfriendly. The crowd is models, a group of made-up gay men, a Real Housewife, and some Russian accents. There are some writers, including the host, who styles himself as one, though he is actually the son of a Manhattan real estate mogul.
Penthouses were originally used as servants’ quarters. This one is three stories tall. Inside it’s all smooth white stone and beveled edges, like a Flinstone cave, or the bowels of an Apple box. Instead of walls there are windows, nine-foot-tall sheets of glass. Some of these windows have handles—doors that lead to balconies. The disturbing thing is that some of them don’t. If you opened the door and stepped out you would just fall to your death. It’s unclear if these doors are locked.
***
X and I meet up every few weeks at one of these parties for free dinner. The invitation for this one emphasized the dinner part. It said, specifically: “The dinner will include a curated dinner from a Parisian chef, incorporating caviar into each of his dishes.” X is sad for the chef. “He doesn’t even get to be named,” she says, “his city of origin is more valuable than his identity.”
We’ve been here for an hour and there is no dinner. I am trying, desperately, to fill up on the corn chip canapés. These look especially paltry because the waiters are huge, out-of-work models, and the snack trays seem absurdly small in their massive hands.
We do a loop around the apartment looking for a dining table. How are they going to feed all of us? Everything is covered in Fendi shit. We eat more of the corn chips. To be fair they are covered in caviar. “Is there going to be dinner?” I ask one of the giants as he floats some more chips under my nose. “No,” he rumbles, stooping down so he can look me in the eye. He shakes his beautiful head. “We also have not eaten.”
***
When you’re up this high mostly you see the tops of other buildings or else the walls of other skyscrapers. This one looks down Park and onto 432 Park Avenue, the tallest, most expensive, and saddest luxury apartment in the world. Its excessive height has caused all sorts of problems, including terrifying wind sways that trap tenants in the elevators. Residents report blackouts, “catastrophic floods,” and vicious noises—“creaking, banging and clicking.” The trash chute “sounds like a bomb” when garbage is tossed in.
X says this is a major design flaw. Garbage chutes are supposed to cut off every couple of floors, but 432 Park forgot to do that, so when someone throws their trash away it falls for miles and miles. We die laughing, imagining the noise on the first floor when someone tosses a San Pelligrino bottle from the 100th.
Some guy is messing with the suicide doors. “Where does this lead to?!” he squawks. A group gathers around him. Nowhere! Nowhere. Nowhere? There is some nervous laughter. After this, the doors are given a wide berth.
April 30, 2023
I’m at the Met to see a ballet. I’m backstage, in the windowless office of one of the directors, a cool, gray-haired lady who goes on frequent walks around the museum so that she doesn’t “suffocate down here.” She always passes by her favorite piece: A severed bust of an Egyptian woman. The top of her head is sliced off, so the focal point is a pair of voluptuous lips.
“She’s very shiny, almost wet,” murmurs the director. And then, giddily: “It’s kind of pornographic.”
The ballet is delayed because Joe Biden is in the neighborhood, at a fundraiser for himself at the home of a Greek billionaire. “We’ll stay here and drink,” instructs the director, “until the motorcade has passed.”
I’m approached by the most incongruous old woman. She is extraordinarily wrinkled but has a swaying, shuffling way of standing, a gap tooth, a girlish giggle, and is wearing a child-sized backpack. The effect is one of a four-year-old in a 100-year-old body. She is very tipsy and introduces herself as a “night architect.” Her job, I gather, is to fly around the world and advise governments on street lighting. She’d just returned from Dublin, where she taught them how to light a certain plaza so that women would feel safe.
“I’m working on a project right now, in Harlem,” she explains. “We’re using string lights along 119th and Malcolm X. And we’re braiding the string lights. You know, braids.”
May 1, 2023
At the Met, again, for the gala exhibition press conference. I go because you can sneak out and see the museum before it’s open. It’s dead empty and would be a good time for a heist.
The first time I went to the conference was with my friend, Q. We left the gala exhibition to go look at the European paintings, and I remember standing in front of two scenes of St. Mark's Square. They are the exact same view, but one is by Canaletto and the other is by Gaurdi. Canaletto was a hyperrealist; he painted with a brush made of a single boar’s hair, and the image is practically a photograph. Gaurdi’s painting is gauzy and vague, but it’s much more beautiful. I asked Q, why is Canaletto more famous than Gaurdi? “Better PR,” she said.
The press conference has changed in the last six years. Now it’s a spectacle, full of celebrities and supermodels and paparazzi. Anna is always there, sometimes without her sunglasses. Once, a fashion editor told me that she wears them because “they are prescription, and she is fucking blind.”
This year, when I tried to sneak out of the conference and into the empty museum, I’m asked who I am and what I think I’m doing. I’m practically escorted out by security. The gala exhibition itself is never very good.
***
There are celebrity encounters at these things. People like to hear about them but they’re not special. The really strange things happen in the wild. The strangest was when I saw Joan Didion being wheeled out of her 70th street apartment by a caregiver. The caregiver was blonde and in a full set of pearls—a choker and earrings. Joan looked ecstatic and deranged. She would die a few weeks later.
The second strangest was at a sake bar in the Lower East Side where they make you share tables. Jay and I were forced into a booth with two strangers. The woman wore a kind of galactic tiara that annoyed me for its excessive quirkiness. She was deep in conversation with a man with long, greasy blonde hair. He smelled terrible which made me doubly annoyed. Then, he spilled water all over the table! We all scrambled to clean it up.
The woman was extremely apologetic. She pushed her carafe of sake toward me. “Do you want?” she asked, “we are finished.” When I said no she insisted. “It’s a very good bottle,” she said, meaning it was expensive. I shrugged and thanked her.
We all drank quietly, and soon the pair left. Next to us, a group of NYU students started squealing and shouting. One of them, a girl, leaned toward me. Her eyes were popping out of her head. She gripped my arm with both hands.
“Do. You. Know. Who. That. Was?”
I shook my head no.
“Bjork,” she hissed, disgusted.
I gave the girl the rest of the carafe.
Postscript
On the Met. The Met’s Live Arts department commissions live dance, music, and art performances throughout the summer. The performances are magnificent; after the motorcade passed I saw Herman Cornejo accompanied by the Catalyst Quartet, which made me cry. The quartet also plays on most weekend evenings in the sculpture garden. Ballet Hispánico, which does not involve Herman but is still wonderful, is performing throughout the summer.
All performances take place in the museum galleries and are free with admission. You don’t have to pay if you live in New York, or if you go in the last 30 minutes before closing. The Met is open until 9:00 p.m. on Friday and Saturday.
8:00 p.m. on Friday is the best time to go.
As I mentioned, the Lagerfeld exhibition is nothing special.
On drinking (on the Upper and Lower East Sides.) My neighborhood spot is Kaia, a South African wine bar, though the people-watching is almost worth the $30 martini at Bemelmans. I’ve heard good things about Melody’s, but really you should go downtown: The Bjork bar is Sake Bar Decibel, but for a less communal atmosphere, Bar Goto is good.
My favorite bar in all of New York is Amor y Amargo. It’s a single room with a tiny bar tended by one grumpy barman who yells at you for vaping. You have four drink options: Negroni, Martini, Old-Fashioned, or Manhattan.
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