Vanishing New York Backup

Lately, it seems that empathy is being talked about. Over the past decade or so, throughout what felt like a peak in the ongoing Age of Narcissism , empathy was very much left out of the cultural conversation. The ability to step into another's shoes, to feel another's feelings, empathy is lacking in narcissistic and sociopathic personalities. That lack is a hallmark of those disorders. Economic crisis is a blow to human narcissism--those at the extreme were enjoying the grandiose sides of their dual personalities and are now mired in their depressive sides, in which they feel worthless (leading to a spike in suicides). This may be why empathy is popping up all over. j-No, LES Garden Heroine, VNY flickr pool Patricia Sellers at Fortune sees a lack of empathy as the failing of Wall Street and all those "arrogant titans of industry who have stirred populist wrath," and notes that President Obama has helped bring empathy back to America. The Times had an in-depth piece...

In the American Dialect Society's journal American Speech , Volume 3, Number 83 , from Fall 2008, I came upon a pair of interesting articles on the popularity of the prefix Celebu . The first of the two articles, "Paris Hilton, Brenda Frazier, Blogs, and the Proliferation of Celebu -," by David West Brown of the University of Michigan, traces the origin of the prefix to its first appearance in the nonce word Celebutante , coined not recently, but by Walter Winchell in 1939. He was writing about the coming-out party of banking heiress Brenda Frazier, who, he wrote, "inspires a new 1-word description: Celebutante." Since the 1930s, explains Brown, celebutante receded into the background of the American language, reappearing in the 1980s to refer to club kids, but only gaining prominence thanks to the blogosphere and Paris Hilton. 2003 seems to be celebutante 's tipping point , when Gawker editor Elizabeth Spiers listed it among her "Current obsessio...

Since Wall Street crumbled and the yunnipocalypse began, it seems more and more journalists have come out of the woodwork to say: 1. They never liked investment bankers, hedgefunders, and other masters of the universe 2. They believe such people have half-destroyed New York 3. They miss the old, pre-Gilded Age city and hope the downturn will bring about its return I'm glad they're speaking up, but where were they for the past 10 years, under a cone of silence? I don't remember hearing these sentiments. At least not until right after the initial crash: Judith Warner in the Times discussed "a certain kind of resentment and sense of injustice that a particular class of non-monied professionals in the New York area came to feel sometime in the late 1990s... a sense that the wrong people had inherited the earth . They had taken over everything." In the New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten wrote, " maybe Manhattan will become affordable again, and cool, and dangerous...

Is the era of the New York Yunnie coming to an end? Has the Yunnipocalypse finally begun? *Also see my opinion piece: The Downturn's Upside, Daily News It began in September 2008 and has snowballed since. Several recent reports ( see links at end of post ) indicate a rising anxiety that New York City is returning to its "bad, old days" of crime and grit. Let's not be afraid. The choice was never between safety or terror. Just like the Bush administration manipulated a nation into believing they had to give up their human rights for the sake of safety, the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations convinced a city they had to give up their uniqueness, wildness, and verve to be secure and live well. They've attempted to create a sanitary, Epcot-style European village , like a planned suburban community, in the middle of what has long been America's most fertile cultural hotbed. They made it amenable to swaggering, narcissistic bots. But maybe that swagg...

September 11 changed us. Remember how, in the weeks following, as the smoke cleared, New York felt more cohesive? The whole city seemed to bind together in a warm, shared sorrow. The baker clapped your shoulder as he handed you a loaf of bread, waitresses gave you sad little smiles of recognition, strangers on the street moved tenderly around each other. It was an unexpected good feeling that could not last--and didn’t. This feeling of connectedness soon crumbled. War began. Our streets rumbled with the noise of demolitions like aftershocks in the wake of the fallen towers. Glass high-rises began rising everywhere, as if to make up for the loss of those 220 floors. And the new buildings were stuffed with banks and stores. The personality of this city changed as "Consume!" became New York's anxious war cry . It has been well documented that Americans changed their consumer habits drastically after 9/11. Now, in the paper " The Sweet Escape ," researchers Naomi M...

I've been puzzling as to why yunnies hate mom-and-pops so very, very much. I was reading this post by EV Grieve in which he quotes an online review of an Irish pub that came down to make way for a new luxury tower. The reviewer writes: " I hope places like this close down soon: We are all working on building a better downtown . I bought a 1.5 million dollar condo around the block from this place. I stopped in one weekday during lunch (i was off.) The place had 3 patrons at the bar, all of which looked worse then the other. The decor is lacking, the floors dirty, and the food was just ok. This place may be decent for someone who does not like finer things ..." And I wondered, as I have many times when reading similar commentary, what is this about? Why do yunnies feel such intense hatred of harmless, dumpy old places? The hatred seems deeply personal and expresses itself in a wish to destroy. It's one thing to say, "I don't like this place so I won't go ...

If you have watched American Psycho lately, as I have, you may have noticed that the film and the main character bear a striking resemblance to today's New York. In 1991, when the book was published, and 2000, when the film came out, Patrick Bateman was a caricature of the 1980s Wall Street yuppie with a sleek condo on the Upper East Side. He was specific to a certain time and place. Watching the movie today, his specificity washes away. In 2008, Bateman's condo could be anywhere in Manhattan (and many places in Brooklyn), he could work in an office in Times Square or Soho, and his malignant narcissism is no longer a pathology of the few. In today's New York, the American Psycho is an everyman. 1. Bateman's kitchen is an orgy of stainless steel and overperforming appliances, features greatly fetishized in today's popular condos. Below is the gleaming metallic kitchen from Blue : 2. Bateman's condo shows off the cold emptiness of luxe condo aesthetic. But his ...

It's warm again. 74 degrees today. It's mid-October and the air ought to be crisp, but it's muggy. With global warming ramping up, what will happen to autumn in New York? Diesel answers that question with their image of a vanished city -- and a vanished world -- in their new ad campaign. Gothamist comments on Wired 's open question: Are these ads evil or fun? I think the answer to that is obvious. The campaign's website features a video that outlines the dire consequences of global warming then says, "Hold on! Global warming cannot stop our lives." Cue the party music. Just like George Bush's hideous insistence that if Americans stop shopping and going to Disneyland then "the terrorists win." Now Diesel tells us: If you stop partying (e.g., burning fossil fuels) then you're letting global warming win. The Washington Post mocks, "You can't be too well-dressed for the apocalypse." Torontoist calls the images ...

Yesterday, a worker was stapling up these shrouds of self-promotional advertecture on Yves , one of the many, many condo buildings currently rising in Chelsea. photo: my flickr Here I see a fantasy of the primordial, prototypical yunnies posing in their post-lapsarian world. Expelled from Paradise, they seek a return to the blue waters of mother's chilly womb. They look towards but not at each other. Separate, they can't touch. Like Narcissus, they may gaze at their own reflections in the pool, but human connection remains out of their reach. Here is a portrait of the alienation that is washing over our city, an alienation that has somehow become admired and longed for, rather than critiqued. How long before there's no one here but these robots?

photo from aboutmattlaw I recently stumbled upon its signage, thanks to this flickr stream . Apparently, the vintage neon sign was up for sale (a couple grand) somewhere on 26th Street. I'm not sure if it's still there. If anyone knows the fate of this sign, please let me know. As for the former McHale's site, this giant condo rises from the rubble, a 43-story "power residence." The advertising imagery makes me think of Randian heroes , titanic John Galts who view free-market capitalism as the way to individual triumph. This isn't the only place Ayn Rand pops up these days. Are we in a new Randian age? I am thinking here also of Thor Equities, named after the Norse warrior god . What world is this where power-hungry, hard-muscled men and women stride out of sportscars to ascend into flaming Babelian towers of steel? According to the website , it's a "rarified world etched in water and fire, stone and glass...and power."

(This post has been updated) "Yunnie" stands for Young Urban Narcissist . An obvious play on the outmoded "yuppie," this neologism was my earlier attempt to grasp a mass cultural shift currently generating and feeding on tremendous change in New York City--and much of the country. While "yuppie" was aimed at professionals, describing people of a certain socioeconomic bracket, "yunnie" described a characterological type. I originally introduced the yunnie in August of 2007. Since then, my ideas about the narcissistic personality and its effect on New York City have evolved. It's no longer a term I use, but you'll still find it scattered among old posts. I've since become interested in the connection between wealth, greed, and materialism and malignant narcissism or sociopathy--the absence of empathy--illustrated in the work of Paul Piff and many other researchers. What I called the yunnie seems to be a psychopathic personality ...