by Lillian Ross
In all, there were a hundred and ninety-five contributions to the site. Among the more well-established academic voices taking part was that of the linguist Ray Jackendoff, who contributed “Some Things I Learned from Noam.” (“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. They really do.”) Steven Pinker, the author of “The Language Instinct,” wrote, “As a teenager I decided to study cognitive science after reading an article about the Chomskyan revolution in the New York Times Magazine, and, ever since then, practically all of my research and writing has been trying to answer questions you have posed.” Pinker said last month that the understated nature of the project (it was kept secret from Chomsky, and, on his birthday, a red folder bound with a gold ribbon was left quietly on his desk) suited its subject perfectly. “He doesn’t go in for ceremony,” Pinker said. “Though I don’t want to say that he has a small ego—he is always a hundred per cent certain that he has been, is, and will be right about everything. He is not a modest man in that sense, but he is a modest man in the sense of promoting himself.”
Speaking by telephone from his home two days after his birthday, Chomsky told me, “The truth of it is that my wife had to explain to me what was going on. But when I figured it out I was overwhelmed.” (He has since been reading the contributions on paper, since he doesn’t access the Internet.)
“When I was a kid, my mother used to arrange a surprise party every year for me, and I never figured it out,” he went on. “I was always completely surprised, and it was the same in this case. It is apparently in the genes.”
1998
A POSTMODERNIST GOES SHOPPING — Paul Goldberger
MICHAEL GRAVES, the architect, used to think that a gondola was one of those long black boats that tourists like to take pictures of in Venice. That was before he signed on to design a new line of home and kitchen accessories for Target, the discount department-store chain. Now he knows that a gondola is an island of back-to-back shelves sitting in an aisle between two areas of merchandise. Starting this week, Graves will have space on several gondolas to display his products in each of the eight hundred and fifty-one Target stores.
Graves was explaining all this and other fun things he’s learned about discount stores one slushy day recently as he took a break to check out the Target store in Menlo Park, New Jersey, not far from his office, in Princeton. He walked the aisles in a blue Ralph Lauren baseball cap, surveying the store’s vast stocks of everything from potato chips to pillowcases. Stopping at a gondola filled with pre-Graves dishes, he picked up a set of four cobalt-blue bowls packaged in an open-fronted box ($6.99). “This is not bad,” he said, obviously torn between the diplomacy required of a member of the Target team and his own designing instincts. Diplomacy won the day as Graves sped up past a display of picture frames decorated with baby shoes in bas-relief ($8.99). “I think there’s always going to be that nostalgic need, but I think you could do it with greater wit,” he said. He turned next to a silvery frame ($9.99) in a shape that looked like a melted valentine. “Well, these things come and go,” he said. “I have learned that picture frames are a form of fashion, like sheets.”
Graves has been designing household objects for years—he is particularly well known for an Alessi teakettle with a whistling bird on the spout, which retails for a hundred and forty-five dollars—but he has never cracked the low end of the market. Now that what might be called the Gap phenomenon, the trending downward of taste, has made mass-market goods more sophisticated, the time seems to have come for an internationally acclaimed architect to design $12.99 picture frames and a $39.99 toaster.
“People ask me, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ” Graves, who is sixty-four years old, said. “I tell them, ‘If I design a library in Denver, that’s for the masses, so why not this sort of stuff?’ ”
During the visit to Target, it was easy to gauge Graves’s level of approval by his walking speed—he slowed down to examine merchandise he liked, and accelerated when he was displeased, as if to make the offensive objects disappear. He practically sprinted past a frothy glass perfume bottle that looked like sugar-coated plastic ($11.99)—“There are so many great Art Deco perfume bottles they could have used as an inspiration,” he said wistfully—whereas his eye was caught by a plastic laundry basket ($5.99) with aerodynamically shaped vent holes and sleek proportions. “Now, if I apply the best test, the my-house test— do I want that object in my house?—I’d have to say yes, I want that,” he said.
He moved on to a gondola piled with toasters ($9.99 to $59.99). “For me, all of these are within ten per cent of each other in looks—they’re all boxes,” he said. “None of them would put a smile on my face at seven-thirty in the morning.” Graves’s own toaster will certainly stand out. It is voluptuously rounded, with a plump blue handle, a yellow control knob, and egg-shaped gray feet—a cartoon version of a toaster.
His pace picked up again when he passed a gondola full of doormats, including a printed still-life ($8.99), a green mat that read “Welcome” and had three frogs on it ($13.99), and a mat adorned with fake cobblestones ($27.99). This is one department that the improved-taste culture does not seem to have reached yet. “I have to say that I’ve never seen one of these mats at anyone’s door, but maybe it’s just the doors I go into,” Graves said. “I guess I’d better do a doormat next.”
1999
ELEGY FOR A PARKING SPACE — John Seabrook
FOR thirteen years, I was part of the nomadic community of people who “garage” a car on the streets of Manhattan. The rhythms of parking shaped my days, my nights, and my weekends. Arriving at 10:30 A.M. on Monday to insure a spot when alternate-side parking began, at eleven, I’d sit in the car reading the paper, writing letters, or sharing information on the hard-to-predict movements of traffic cops with the other people who parked on my block. (Like salmon returning to their birth rivers, people who park on the street tend to be drawn to the same blocks.) A spot secured on Monday didn’t actually have to be relinquished until Thursday, but to be sure of a Friday spot you had to move the car across the street on Tuesday. Extending a weekend on Long Island until Monday meant missing the chance for a Sunday-night spot—always iffy, but doable—and that meant, almost certainly, having to pay for a parking garage or settle for a meter, which would require leaving the house every hour to put quarters in it.
Of course, one could not actually use the car, once parked, except on weekends. Some might argue that the time and energy one invests in looking for free parking is worth more than the three hundred dollars or so a month it costs to keep a car in a parking garage. But for me parking on the street was worth it. I knew the sudden joy of spying that rectangle of heaven that I could lay claim to simply by having a car, and I knew the devastation of seeing the car right in front of me grab it. Parking for free made all the other usurious New York City expenses more bearable (such as the unincorporated-business tax, which is the penalty that the city makes the self-employed pay for not being a corporation). Even a fifty-five-dollar parking ticket is a lot easier to swallow when sweetened by the thought of what a monthly garage costs.
But life is what happens to you while you’re busy looking for a parking space, as John Lennon sort of said. When my wife and I had a child, I convinced myself that it was time to upgrade to a more comfortable and reliable car than the 1987 Toyota Land Cruiser that I’d bought, with eighty thousand miles on it, in 1992. I felt we needed something that wouldn’t give the kid Shaken Baby Syndrome simply driving down Greenwich Street.
Parking on the street had meant not having to worry about getting a new car. In order to discourage potential thieves, I kept my car as messy as possible—old newspapers, McDonald’s wrappers, clumps of pennies gummed together with spilled Coke, empty bottles that rolled out from under the front seats when you hit the brakes. Whatever temporary loss of status I might have suffered by arriving in certain driveways in Connecticut in a semi-beater, I would regain when I informed people that I parked my car on the street. Out-of-towners, esp
ecially ex–New Yorkers, love to congratulate themselves on not having to pay three hundred dollars to park their cars, and finding out that I kept a car in the city for free was usually a blow. You mean you park on the street? And nothing happens to your car? Nope—well, nothing serious. In all the years that I garaged my car on the street, I got some dings and, once, lost a radio, but it was a crummy radio.
As I drove our new car, an Audi wagon, home from Zumbach, the dealer, to the expensive garage I would be parking it in, my perspective on New York City traffic changed drastically. Cabdrivers with whom I’d once gleefully jockeyed for position now seemed to be driving like madmen. Stay away from my car, I said out loud several times. After two days of driving in the city, it was a relief when we packed up for the recent holiday weekend and headed to New England. Only on crossing the Henry Hudson Bridge did I begin to unwind, and not until I arrived in the bucolic spaces of Vermont was I able to begin to enjoy owning a new car.
On the following morning, the warm winter sun was twinkling fiercely on my car’s Santorin-blue mica finish. The snow on the roof of the house began to melt. “Usually roofs around here creep,” a resident of the village later told me. “But this time they shot.” A week’s worth of heavy snow and ice came whizzing down, projected five or six feet away from the house, and landed directly on top of the car. The weight stove in the roof, put a “bird bath,” as the body-shop guy called it, in the hood, and dented the car in other places. I had insured the car against the usual urban threats, theft and vandalism, but I hadn’t thought about thawing snow falling off a roof in Vermont. I had a tense two-day wait for the insurance agent to open to find out if I was covered.
So now I have no car. It’s back at Zumbach, getting a new roof. It turns out that I am insured, although I’m out the deductible and I’m paying the garage for space I can’t use. I see beautiful parking spots around the neighborhood, but they no longer delight me. They mock me.
1999
A LITTLE BIT OF AUDREY FOR EVERY ONE — Daphne Merkin
IT wasn’t breakfast at Tiffany’s, but one recent evening, across the street at Bergdorf Goodman, they were passing around champagne and hors d’œuvres in celebration of a new book entitled “Audrey Style.” Audrey Hepburn, whose regal neck and doe eyes—not to mention twenty-inch waist— were the envy of every woman, would have turned seventy last week. The birthdays of late, lamented icons provide the perfect marketing opportunity for misty-eyed reappraisals, and Pamela Clarke Keogh, the author of “Audrey Style,” seated at a table amid the department store’s cosmetics counters, couldn’t sign copies of her gorgeous-looking book fast enough.
Billy Wilder, who directed the actress in “Sabrina,” once remarked, “This girl, single-handedly, may make bosoms a thing of the past.” And, after spotting her in her first major movie, “Roman Holiday” (for which she won an Academy Award for best actress), women rushed to copy every aspect of her guileless style, from her breezy haircut to her white cotton shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Still, Hepburn was known to refer to herself—with the entrancing modesty that was as much a trademark as her ballet flats—as “just a skinny broad.”
Keogh’s book is short on substance and a bit muddled on the details (did Hepburn wear a size-8½ shoe? or was it a size 10?), but it is gratifyingly long on photographs, fashion sketches, and gushing print-bites. The word “grace” appears on about every third page, and we learn that the determinedly svelte actress (Hepburn, who was five feet seven, kept her weight at a firm hundred and ten pounds) liked pasta and an occasional chocolate fix. Of course, she had trained as a dancer, which gave her enviable posture in addition to a formidable will. (“She’s disciplined, like all those ballet dames,” Humphrey Bogart is quoted as saying.)
“Audrey Style,” published by HarperCollins, contains the briefest of introductions—no more than an imprimatur, really—by the reclusive Hubert de Givenchy, the seventy-two-year-old couturier who helped create Hepburn’s signature style, beginning with “Sabrina.” In 1953, he agreed to see her in his Paris atelier, under the misapprehension that she was Katharine Hepburn; since he was busy preparing a collection, she whisked through his workrooms, plucking outfits off the racks. They became lifelong friends, and whether Audrey Hepburn’s sophisticated-schoolgirl look owes everything to Givenchy or is a reflection of her own taste, as well, is the stuff of bitchy speculation.
At Bergdorf, the crowd dined on miniature hot dogs, Roquefort-covered walnuts on slices of Granny Smith apples, and raspberry tartlets, a menu that was supposedly inspired by Hepburn’s favorite foods. It’s hard to believe that the actress, who considered herself “chubby” when she ballooned to a hundred and thirty pounds, actually ate enough food to have favorites. But Keogh insists that Hepburn “ate a lot,” and credits her skinniness to that most maddening of all explanations, “great metabolism.”
Explaining why she decided to do a Hepburn book, Keogh said, “She is as vital and present today as she was years ago.” Sure enough, the windows of Bergdorf were filled with Audrey-stylish spring fashions, and the store is selling a hundred-and-seventy-five-dollar pink satin evening clutch filled with makeup by Prescriptives—“for people who don’t read,” as Keogh says. (It was going to be called the “Funny Face Kit” until the people at Paramount, who own the rights to the film, got wind of it.) Surrounded by a sea of young women in sleeveless Hepburn-like sheaths, I found it hard not to wonder what the actress, who preferred her Swiss farmhouse to the swirl of show business, and who spent her last years working on behalf of UNICEF, would have made of all the glamour and greed attached to the use of her name. Picturing her here is difficult—it’s much easier to see her as Holly Golightly, that soigné waif, staring in at the windows of Tiffany.
1999
BILL AND HILL, MEET ROB AND LAURA — Andy Borowitz
WESTCHESTER COUNTY cocktail-party conversations, which often wind up being about how much you think your house is worth, became unexpectedly livelier this summer. Suddenly, it was possible to speculate about how much your house would be worth if Bill and Hillary Clinton moved in next door. Most reporters missed this authentically Westchesterish aspect of the story, because they were too busy poking television cameras in local residents’ faces and asking: In the event of a Clinton relocation, how will you feel about all those television cameras?
This, of course, is a very silly question, because if there is any place on earth that has historically been hospitable to the medium of television it is Westchester County. It could be argued that without the inspiration provided by the leafy suburbs of Westchester the television sitcom could never have survived to become the mature art form it is today.
Chappaqua, where the Clintons just signed a contract to buy an eleven-room Dutch Colonial priced at $1,695,000, is down the road from Peekskill, which was home to Mrs. Garrett’s cheese shop in “Facts of Life.” Ann Marie, the character Marlo Thomas played in “That Girl,” grew up just north of the Westchester border in Brewster, a few exits away from Pound Ridge, where the First Couple looked over a seven-acre, $1.2-million property with tennis courts. Tuckahoe, where Bea Arthur trod the fine line between feminist and harpy in the Norman Lear sitcom “Maude,” is right next to Edgemont, where the Clintons toured a seven-bedroom turn-of-the-century Colonial priced at $1.7 million. (Edgemont, the Clintons may have reasoned, was less likely than Tuckahoe to inspire unflattering limericks.) And New Rochelle, which the Clintons also visited in their quest for suburban housing, was immortalized by “The Dick Van Dyke Show”—a program that may have uncannily predicted what the Westchester phase of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s life together will be like.
Comparisons between Bill and Hillary Clinton and Rob and Laura Petrie may not be as striking as those famously spooky Lincoln/Kennedy parallels (Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln, etc.), but they are difficult to ignore. Both couples feature one hardworking careerist trying to make it in a new field (Rob/Hillary) and one housebound spo
use with way too much free time and a tendency to get into fixes that require blubbering apologies (Laura/Bill). Both families have one child (Ritchie/ Chelsea), who appears infrequently and says almost nothing. Both breadwinners have to contend with irrational, mercurial screamers (Alan Brady/ Rudolph Giuliani). Even the details offer up eerie parallels: Morey Amsterdam/ Chuck Schumer; Capri pants/golf pants; twin beds/separate bedrooms. And so on.
Commentators discussing the retirement years of our young President have invoked Fitzgerald’s shopworn dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. Part of the beauty of a sitcom like “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” however, was that each episode did, reassuringly, have a second act, after the commercial break, in which the mishaps and mixups of the first half of the show were satisfactorily, if somewhat speedily, resolved. Perhaps it is this sort of expeditious redemption, and not just an eleven-room Dutch Colonial, that the Clintons are really looking for in Westchester. With this idea in mind, it is possible to envision the first few episodes of “The Hillary Rodham Clinton Show”: