(The Long Goodbye Series)
There’s a running commentary that goes on between we natives who came of age in the late Sixties here on The East End. It starts off with an easy banter that stirs tall tales of antics at our high school hangouts (The Marmador in East Hampton and Sip ‘N Soda in Southampton). That soon segways to the freewheeling discovery of local kids stumbling on the natural wonders and curiosities of a place that few of us expected would become untenable in our lifetimes.
If you grew up on The East End, and by that I mean Westhampton to Montauk (in those days the North Fork was truly for hayseeds other than a pocket of New York renegades that gathered way out in Orient), in the days of James Brown performing at The Saint James Hotel and the mod set drinking gin martini’s at Rigley’s Steak House and Herb McCarthy’s Bowden Square, you were, as the Paul Simon song says, born at the right time.
Ours was an East End peopled with farmers, fishermen, tradesfolk, housewives and a curious briny breed of creative types who sought refuge from the hard surfaced realities of city life in the weather worn fishing cottages of Accabonac Harbor and porch-fronted farm houses of Sagaponack’s potato fields.
Rag-topped VW bugs, faded fiats and rusting MGs mingled among the station wagons and pickup trucks on Main Street on any given Sunday when folks filed into The News Company and Silver’s to buy the Sunday papers. Broods of local kids gathered into booths at The Paradise or The Candy Kitchen for breakfast after morning mass. Brushed hair and shined shoes all around. Ours were wide spaces, empty barns and empty beaches. Uncluttered back roads.
There at the counter, in straight-legged jeans or baggy khaki’s, sat the train weary foot tapping, cigarette smoking beatnik. Recounting free verse incantations of Frank O’Hara and Alan Ginsberg in the scrawny flesh and wide-eyed innocence of a 1965 Bob Dylan. Artists sat elbow to elbow with the farmer and the fishermen at the counter anticipating winter. Pioneering types traded chores for studio space. In summer they shared rooms not houses.
It never crossed our minds, or for that matter I doubt it crossed the minds of the light-seeking 1960s city folk, content to bunk among potato bins and rent funky bungalows with hotplates, that the East End would one day morph into this current rendition of The Hamptons – where fishing shacks are bulldozed to make way for the water views of 6500 square-foot private homes of Wall Street traders. And folks spend more and more money to buffer themselves from one another.
The funny part is (if there is one), it was never about who owned what. It was about the empty beach, and the potato field, and the fishing shack. It was about living small and thinking big. And talking to the beatnik at the counter.
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Money Talks When The Campaign Comes To Town
If there is any residual doubt that modern politics in America is a fractured and dysfunctional blind date, just take note of the blackout of local coverage of the recent Romney campaign’s Republican fundraising blitz that swooped into town for a 3-hit whirlwind on Sunday, July 8th. Raising over $3 million dollars in a matter of hours, the Romney visit was a well-calculated checkbook booster intended to reach into the ready cash of the uber-elite who have carved up prime ocean-front real estate in The Hamptons these the last 20 years.
The resulting press draught is sad yet not surprising in a region where fundraisers of every ilk are tantamount to exhaling during the summer months. Among the non-invited, the most concerted refrain was exasperation over the traffic bottle-neck that stalled the already untenable driving conditions we have become accustomed to morning, noon and night getting in and out of our villages.
Other than the headline-grabbing pre-arrival press coverage which found its way onto the front pages of all our broadsheet weeklies and Internet news blogs, actual real-time reporting on the three fundraisers, from either inside or outside the Secret Service-flanked estate bounds of Ron Perelman’s 56-acre Georgica Pond compound, Julia and David Koch’s Meadow Lane residence and Clifford Sobel’s Southampton beach home just down the lane, was relegated to sound bites snatched from the $5000-lunch plate and $50,000-dinner plate donors as they entered the gated drives.
The 100-plus protestors who were bused in from Manhattan to flank the beachhead off Cooper’s and trek their way to the high-tide line in front of the Koch estate were effectively marginalized in their outrage, equally tempted to take a dip in the 67-degree ocean while chanting “Romney Has A Koch Problem.”
Political ideologies aside, this snatch and run campaign stop was a cynical affair, engineered to buffer the presidential candidate among his devotees long enough for a few choice handshakes while bolstering campaign coffers for the four-and-a-half month presidential sprint ahead. Only the New York Times managed to report from the sidelines on Romney’s remarks which attempted to bridge the vast divide between the accumulated wealth of the attendees and the relative depravity of the voting masses: “If you are here, by and large, you are doing just fine,” he said, his voice audible to a reporter standing on a public street not far away. “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about those here. I spend a lot of time worrying about those that are poor and those in the middle class that are finding it hard to make a bright future for themselves.” (New York Times, July 8, 2012)
Mother Jones, the progressive political national watchdog magazine, and locally, The East Hampton Press, attempted to capture the view from the ground, collecting push-back mainly from the bused-in protestors who rallied at Cooper’s Beach and a cadre of local Occupy supporters who gathered in the Meadow Lane neighborhood. Fewer than a dozen protestors showed up in East Hampton and the arrests of David Fink and Simon Kinsella made the next week’s edition of The East Hampton Star for reportedly colliding their sailboat “with a marine patrol boat stationed along the shoreline of the Creeks, Ron Perelman’s 56-acre estate. In a release, police said the pair had ignored directions to turn away.”
All said and done, raising cash was the clear purpose and the sole local message of Romney’s Hampton’s visit. After decades of over-the-top fundraising summer events, for the lion’s share of what comprises the daily consensus of The Hamptons as its’ multitudes forage from farm stand to surfside, the campaign stop was remote, elite and quickly forgettable.
A presidential candidate came to town and only the power-elite who ponied up for the $25,000 ticket heard what he had to say. The rest of us heard nothing — other than the off- hand accounts of local notables Andew Sabin, Ted Conklin and police officials patrolling errant protestors off the shoreline.
Brace yourselves for round two. Word is out the Democrats are coming in August.
The resulting press draught is sad yet not surprising in a region where fundraisers of every ilk are tantamount to exhaling during the summer months. Among the non-invited, the most concerted refrain was exasperation over the traffic bottle-neck that stalled the already untenable driving conditions we have become accustomed to morning, noon and night getting in and out of our villages.
Other than the headline-grabbing pre-arrival press coverage which found its way onto the front pages of all our broadsheet weeklies and Internet news blogs, actual real-time reporting on the three fundraisers, from either inside or outside the Secret Service-flanked estate bounds of Ron Perelman’s 56-acre Georgica Pond compound, Julia and David Koch’s Meadow Lane residence and Clifford Sobel’s Southampton beach home just down the lane, was relegated to sound bites snatched from the $5000-lunch plate and $50,000-dinner plate donors as they entered the gated drives.
The 100-plus protestors who were bused in from Manhattan to flank the beachhead off Cooper’s and trek their way to the high-tide line in front of the Koch estate were effectively marginalized in their outrage, equally tempted to take a dip in the 67-degree ocean while chanting “Romney Has A Koch Problem.”
Political ideologies aside, this snatch and run campaign stop was a cynical affair, engineered to buffer the presidential candidate among his devotees long enough for a few choice handshakes while bolstering campaign coffers for the four-and-a-half month presidential sprint ahead. Only the New York Times managed to report from the sidelines on Romney’s remarks which attempted to bridge the vast divide between the accumulated wealth of the attendees and the relative depravity of the voting masses: “If you are here, by and large, you are doing just fine,” he said, his voice audible to a reporter standing on a public street not far away. “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about those here. I spend a lot of time worrying about those that are poor and those in the middle class that are finding it hard to make a bright future for themselves.” (New York Times, July 8, 2012)
Mother Jones, the progressive political national watchdog magazine, and locally, The East Hampton Press, attempted to capture the view from the ground, collecting push-back mainly from the bused-in protestors who rallied at Cooper’s Beach and a cadre of local Occupy supporters who gathered in the Meadow Lane neighborhood. Fewer than a dozen protestors showed up in East Hampton and the arrests of David Fink and Simon Kinsella made the next week’s edition of The East Hampton Star for reportedly colliding their sailboat “with a marine patrol boat stationed along the shoreline of the Creeks, Ron Perelman’s 56-acre estate. In a release, police said the pair had ignored directions to turn away.”
All said and done, raising cash was the clear purpose and the sole local message of Romney’s Hampton’s visit. After decades of over-the-top fundraising summer events, for the lion’s share of what comprises the daily consensus of The Hamptons as its’ multitudes forage from farm stand to surfside, the campaign stop was remote, elite and quickly forgettable.
A presidential candidate came to town and only the power-elite who ponied up for the $25,000 ticket heard what he had to say. The rest of us heard nothing — other than the off- hand accounts of local notables Andew Sabin, Ted Conklin and police officials patrolling errant protestors off the shoreline.
Brace yourselves for round two. Word is out the Democrats are coming in August.
Forgive Us Our Daily Read
It may have been the Matt Lauer cover story in Hampton’s Magazine’s season opener, uncovering his penchant for cleaning up debris from neighborhood back roads, a garbage bag in his rubber glove clad hand and pre-teen daughter in tow, that tipped the scales for me.
Kudos to Lauer for his civic duty and sense of place. He’s spent his summers in Amagansett for the better part of his life and has lived in Sag Harbor full time long enough now to garner headlines for normalcy – suffering a separated shoulder from a bicycling accident (2009) to recently winding his way through planning board approval - albeit for a 40-acre horse farm off Deerfield Road in Water Mill.
Is the celebrity news cycle so under nourished that a Huffington Post headline, flashing a ‘scruffy’ Matt attends a recent Hamptons bash, is actually newsworthy? News flash: The ‘weekend’ Matt Lauer actually likes to unbutton his collar and, drum roll please, chillax a bit. Hurry, ink up the presses.
It’s the Johnny-come-lately celebrity reporter that does us all a huge disservice by making news out of ordinary life witnessed in arms reach of ordinary folk. Why, I saw Edie Falco choosing lamps and placemats at Sylvester and Co. but you don’t see me running home to post. We can’t expect her to eat by candlelight forever.
Coming of age in The Hamptons, you get to witness a great many ordinary moments of extraordinary personalities. Truman Capote and Jim Jones in rousing debate at the old Bobby Vans; DiNero sitting quietly on a bench outside of Book Hampton Southampton on a late fall afternoon (circa 1975), Bill Bradlee (post Pentagon Papers) parking his car in the Reutershan lot in East Hampton Village on his way to the liquor store; Fran Lebowitz exiting a Woody Allen movie (circa 1980); Craig Claiborne picking up his order from the butcher counter at Dreesen’s — ordinary moments nobody wrote about at a time when you were recognized for your talents and achievements, not your ability to be like the rest of us.
These days it’ll wind up on more than one celebrity page if Billy Joel parks his BSA motorcycle outside The American Hotel while stopping in for lunch. Alec Baldwin makes headlines going to yoga class with Lorne Michaels and Paul McCartney in Amagansett. If Kelly Ripa takes her kids to Bay Burger the blogosphere lights up in awe.
However, it gives me great pleasure to find John C. White, of the resolute Bridgehampton farm family, on Hamptons Magazine’s “Power List: The Hamptons 100” — the only native to make the grade, commended for doing what his family has done for generations, farm an oceanfront plot of land in Bridgehampton. Though, the heart saddens when it is for having to defend his rights to ownership in court — a genuine news worthy battle was provocatively reported in the July 2011 issue Vanity Fair, in an installment of “Letters From The Hamptons” by Michael Shnayerson, titled “Betting the Farm.”
I think it was Russell Baker’s coining of ‘the white wine and Volvo set’ in his New York Times Observer column (circa 1978) which first fueled my appetite for a keen essay treatment which shines a light on our very human vulnerabilities. His was a wry and satirical grace, having the effect of walking you into a room and introducing you to the dinner guests, winking from the corner of his eye as he sits you down beside the social climber who inadvertently offers up delightfully quotable faux pas right on through cocktail hour.
It is not that The Hamptons, this year’s Fab 100, and the rest of us simple folk are not up to something newsworthy — it’s the competitive laziness of glossy page editors and reporters who serve up thinly drawn snippets of the mundane. With such a rich and fertile landscape of personality, intrigue and creativity afoot from The Crow’s Nest to Red Bar, the Montauk Bluffs to Conscience Point, this is our daily read? Oh — Did I fail to mention that I saw Jon Stewart at the dump, Angelica Houston ordering tacos at La Fondita, Jerry Seinfeld watching a Whaler’s baseball game, Donald Sultan drinking coffee and Jason Epstein out walking his dog?
Kudos to Lauer for his civic duty and sense of place. He’s spent his summers in Amagansett for the better part of his life and has lived in Sag Harbor full time long enough now to garner headlines for normalcy – suffering a separated shoulder from a bicycling accident (2009) to recently winding his way through planning board approval - albeit for a 40-acre horse farm off Deerfield Road in Water Mill.
Is the celebrity news cycle so under nourished that a Huffington Post headline, flashing a ‘scruffy’ Matt attends a recent Hamptons bash, is actually newsworthy? News flash: The ‘weekend’ Matt Lauer actually likes to unbutton his collar and, drum roll please, chillax a bit. Hurry, ink up the presses.
It’s the Johnny-come-lately celebrity reporter that does us all a huge disservice by making news out of ordinary life witnessed in arms reach of ordinary folk. Why, I saw Edie Falco choosing lamps and placemats at Sylvester and Co. but you don’t see me running home to post. We can’t expect her to eat by candlelight forever.
Coming of age in The Hamptons, you get to witness a great many ordinary moments of extraordinary personalities. Truman Capote and Jim Jones in rousing debate at the old Bobby Vans; DiNero sitting quietly on a bench outside of Book Hampton Southampton on a late fall afternoon (circa 1975), Bill Bradlee (post Pentagon Papers) parking his car in the Reutershan lot in East Hampton Village on his way to the liquor store; Fran Lebowitz exiting a Woody Allen movie (circa 1980); Craig Claiborne picking up his order from the butcher counter at Dreesen’s — ordinary moments nobody wrote about at a time when you were recognized for your talents and achievements, not your ability to be like the rest of us.
These days it’ll wind up on more than one celebrity page if Billy Joel parks his BSA motorcycle outside The American Hotel while stopping in for lunch. Alec Baldwin makes headlines going to yoga class with Lorne Michaels and Paul McCartney in Amagansett. If Kelly Ripa takes her kids to Bay Burger the blogosphere lights up in awe.
However, it gives me great pleasure to find John C. White, of the resolute Bridgehampton farm family, on Hamptons Magazine’s “Power List: The Hamptons 100” — the only native to make the grade, commended for doing what his family has done for generations, farm an oceanfront plot of land in Bridgehampton. Though, the heart saddens when it is for having to defend his rights to ownership in court — a genuine news worthy battle was provocatively reported in the July 2011 issue Vanity Fair, in an installment of “Letters From The Hamptons” by Michael Shnayerson, titled “Betting the Farm.”
I think it was Russell Baker’s coining of ‘the white wine and Volvo set’ in his New York Times Observer column (circa 1978) which first fueled my appetite for a keen essay treatment which shines a light on our very human vulnerabilities. His was a wry and satirical grace, having the effect of walking you into a room and introducing you to the dinner guests, winking from the corner of his eye as he sits you down beside the social climber who inadvertently offers up delightfully quotable faux pas right on through cocktail hour.
It is not that The Hamptons, this year’s Fab 100, and the rest of us simple folk are not up to something newsworthy — it’s the competitive laziness of glossy page editors and reporters who serve up thinly drawn snippets of the mundane. With such a rich and fertile landscape of personality, intrigue and creativity afoot from The Crow’s Nest to Red Bar, the Montauk Bluffs to Conscience Point, this is our daily read? Oh — Did I fail to mention that I saw Jon Stewart at the dump, Angelica Houston ordering tacos at La Fondita, Jerry Seinfeld watching a Whaler’s baseball game, Donald Sultan drinking coffee and Jason Epstein out walking his dog?
Monday, May 28, 2012
Sunday, May 27, 2012
The Illusive Hamptons Brand
At a recent bag lunch series sponsored by the Sag Harbor Chamber of Commerce, international public relations maestro Robbie Vorhaus (most commonly known in these parts as a congenial village neighbor); spoke to the importance of brand identity. Wrestling with the quintessential question — “What do I stand for and represent?” — the audience of local business leaders grappled with the concept of defining their brand.
Vorhaus suggests it starts with your story — the trials and triumphs of arriving, as core beliefs and values are forged along the journey. So I sat for a while and considered the phenomenon of the East End becoming The Hamptons. As a regional brand and social state of mind, ‘The Hamptons’ came into focus towards the end of my teens in the late 70s. Broadsheets held center stage as their wide-winged coverage reflected idyllic pristine summer afternoons and the ever-vigilant efforts of the village improvement society. To the non-initiated, the zoning battles and tourist boom of the fast approaching disco-driven 80s were as unimaginable as $325 village beach permits. Moms stood, puffing cigarettes, watching their kids, body surfing in the whitewash just below the lifeguard stand as faded VW’s, their rag tops down, peppered the parking lots at Flying Point, Georgica Beach and Indian Wells.
We all seemed to happily co-exist for the sheer authenticity of a Carvel and ticket to the Bridgehampton Drive-In on Thursday nights, in the days of Ridgley’s Steak House, Herb McCarthy’s Bowden Square and James Brown at The Hotel St. James. The moneyed were undetectable then and it’s hard to say who liked it more; they or the farmers they commiserated with at the post office counter buying four-cent stamps.
Here, in Sag Harbor a few artists and writers had managed to nab listing salt boxes on John Street and neighbors remembered having a cup of coffee with John Steinbeck at The Paradise in the days when you ordered your eggs over easy from George. Surfers and hearty fishing families took hold in Montauk and the few celebrities spotted canoodling at The Quiet Clam were simply left alone. You weren’t from The Hamptons then – you were from Amagansett, Water Mill, Springs and North Sea. In those four or five years, from 1979 to 1984, when disco ruled the airwaves and newly minted stock market money fell into the hands of even more freshly minted MBA grads, voracious in their appetites, flocking into LIRR cars on Track 19 heading to ‘The Hamptons,’ a social brand was born.
The New York Times had begun to take notice of a shift in atmosphere as early as the mid-1960s as the quiet beach scenes of Fairfield Porter’s Southampton gave way to Andy Warhol and Peter Beard’s experimental artist compounds on the Montauk bluffs. Yet, it wasn’t until the Yuppie era’s weekly mass exodus in search of sex and sun, glutting the LIE Friday evenings for a wild Hamptons’ weekend, did we all bear the change.
Sunday afternoon tea dances at The Attic and The Swamp ruled traffic flow for miles along the Montauk Highway. Lobster salad at Loaves and Fishes inched its way to $28 a pound and the local papers were peppered with headlines warning of the dangers of ‘grouper house’ rentals. Along came Hamptons Magazine and its slick, glossy spreads of disco clubs on Dune Road and cheeky reports of celebrity spotting. Dan’s Papers swelled to a voluminous beach read with classifieds and personal ads to match. Real estate prices soared as potato fields were sold off to the developers of uber-elite estates on Further Lane, Parsonage and Ox Pasture Road.
A new story was being written in the 1980s and 1990s and along with it came a cadre of print contenders who, too, came and went in the wake of the sea change. The Hamptons became front page news from Hollywood to Cannes as both a brand and a place, while the newspapers, magazines and news programs that attempted to capture its essence became a part of its social fabric.
By the new millennium, ‘The Hamptons’ was so firmly ensconced in the national psyche as a premium brand that vacillates between luxury and tacky excesses that it is equally represented in the media as the height of achievement and bane of supercilious frivolity.
Happily for those of us keeping watch, we are detecting signs of change yet again as a strain of vitality emerges from the rubble of the real estate bust that marked the end of a wanton Hamptons era. It’s old news now, almost 30 years later, when a $22 hamburger seems reasonable after waiting 40 minutes for a table. Somewhere along the way brand giants Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren co-opted the indelible resilience of the symbolic Hamptons lifestyle and the local farmers markets have brought us back to the land.
As the gears of tourism wind up for Summer 2012, now catering to the grass-fed, organic-air-breathing, feet-never-touched-the-ground, I-don’t-eat-meat-sort vying for a seat at the hamburger joint, I am reminded of the pre-Hamptons charm of a $2 ice cream cone and await this summer’s headlines.
Vorhaus suggests it starts with your story — the trials and triumphs of arriving, as core beliefs and values are forged along the journey. So I sat for a while and considered the phenomenon of the East End becoming The Hamptons. As a regional brand and social state of mind, ‘The Hamptons’ came into focus towards the end of my teens in the late 70s. Broadsheets held center stage as their wide-winged coverage reflected idyllic pristine summer afternoons and the ever-vigilant efforts of the village improvement society. To the non-initiated, the zoning battles and tourist boom of the fast approaching disco-driven 80s were as unimaginable as $325 village beach permits. Moms stood, puffing cigarettes, watching their kids, body surfing in the whitewash just below the lifeguard stand as faded VW’s, their rag tops down, peppered the parking lots at Flying Point, Georgica Beach and Indian Wells.
We all seemed to happily co-exist for the sheer authenticity of a Carvel and ticket to the Bridgehampton Drive-In on Thursday nights, in the days of Ridgley’s Steak House, Herb McCarthy’s Bowden Square and James Brown at The Hotel St. James. The moneyed were undetectable then and it’s hard to say who liked it more; they or the farmers they commiserated with at the post office counter buying four-cent stamps.
Here, in Sag Harbor a few artists and writers had managed to nab listing salt boxes on John Street and neighbors remembered having a cup of coffee with John Steinbeck at The Paradise in the days when you ordered your eggs over easy from George. Surfers and hearty fishing families took hold in Montauk and the few celebrities spotted canoodling at The Quiet Clam were simply left alone. You weren’t from The Hamptons then – you were from Amagansett, Water Mill, Springs and North Sea. In those four or five years, from 1979 to 1984, when disco ruled the airwaves and newly minted stock market money fell into the hands of even more freshly minted MBA grads, voracious in their appetites, flocking into LIRR cars on Track 19 heading to ‘The Hamptons,’ a social brand was born.
The New York Times had begun to take notice of a shift in atmosphere as early as the mid-1960s as the quiet beach scenes of Fairfield Porter’s Southampton gave way to Andy Warhol and Peter Beard’s experimental artist compounds on the Montauk bluffs. Yet, it wasn’t until the Yuppie era’s weekly mass exodus in search of sex and sun, glutting the LIE Friday evenings for a wild Hamptons’ weekend, did we all bear the change.
Sunday afternoon tea dances at The Attic and The Swamp ruled traffic flow for miles along the Montauk Highway. Lobster salad at Loaves and Fishes inched its way to $28 a pound and the local papers were peppered with headlines warning of the dangers of ‘grouper house’ rentals. Along came Hamptons Magazine and its slick, glossy spreads of disco clubs on Dune Road and cheeky reports of celebrity spotting. Dan’s Papers swelled to a voluminous beach read with classifieds and personal ads to match. Real estate prices soared as potato fields were sold off to the developers of uber-elite estates on Further Lane, Parsonage and Ox Pasture Road.
A new story was being written in the 1980s and 1990s and along with it came a cadre of print contenders who, too, came and went in the wake of the sea change. The Hamptons became front page news from Hollywood to Cannes as both a brand and a place, while the newspapers, magazines and news programs that attempted to capture its essence became a part of its social fabric.
By the new millennium, ‘The Hamptons’ was so firmly ensconced in the national psyche as a premium brand that vacillates between luxury and tacky excesses that it is equally represented in the media as the height of achievement and bane of supercilious frivolity.
Happily for those of us keeping watch, we are detecting signs of change yet again as a strain of vitality emerges from the rubble of the real estate bust that marked the end of a wanton Hamptons era. It’s old news now, almost 30 years later, when a $22 hamburger seems reasonable after waiting 40 minutes for a table. Somewhere along the way brand giants Martha Stewart and Ralph Lauren co-opted the indelible resilience of the symbolic Hamptons lifestyle and the local farmers markets have brought us back to the land.
As the gears of tourism wind up for Summer 2012, now catering to the grass-fed, organic-air-breathing, feet-never-touched-the-ground, I-don’t-eat-meat-sort vying for a seat at the hamburger joint, I am reminded of the pre-Hamptons charm of a $2 ice cream cone and await this summer’s headlines.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Freedom Of Repression? The Art Of Side Yard Zoning
“The Legs,” as they are euphemistically called,
have become something of a news darling. The debate is over side yard variances, art verses
architecture, and local predilection from respective vantages points.
A curious feeding frenzy of news gluttony which results in
endless articles appearing in rapid succession in Newsday, The Wall Street Journal, Curbed Hamptons, a cadre of local
web outlets and most recently ArtNewsWorldwide.com, speaks to the nature of how local news becomes a bigger story. Let it be said the hometown
media have amply
constructed the crux of the debate and laid out the matters of precedence and zoning
mandates which entangle Larry River's 'Legs' in their controversy. Yet, the further out from the debate, the more
myopic the controversy appears. One can
almost imagine a New Yorker cover
drawing of the Atlantic Ocean, The Legs, the Manhattan skyline and the Hollywood
sign looming in the distance in a Saul Steinberg drawing. Any good news person worth their salt knows
all news is local if you can just connect the dots.
In this curious case of social climbing, the much larger
issue of freedom of expression as it relates to home ownership comes to light.
It is one thing to gain news prominence on the merits of local zoning
restrictions and altogether another thing to gain news prominence on the merits
of social and cultural association, ie:
The Legs to The Hamptons, Larry Rivers to The Contemporary Art Scene,
Manhattan press to national news. In one fell swoop, Sag Harbor is now indelibly
linked to the question of freedom of expression, which would have pleased Larry
Rivers to no end.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Hear The Un-Buzzing My Friend
It's back to conspicuous consumption in The Hamptons as Irene's wrath fades into the backdrop of sales on Newtown Lane, while in farm fields nearby Canadian geese flock to begin their conventions north and keeper bass swim thru the gut opened by Mother Nature herself at Scott Cameron.
It's a picture perfect Labor Day Weekend as snappers flop and coo in the bays. How quiet and calm it was with the lights out and the buzz un-buzzing. Even the most must-see-event-driven among us must have enjoyed a moment of solitude and thought, why don't I do this more often?
As school kids soak in the last vestiges of summer va-ca and young Manhattanites scurry to regain their too-cool-to-care weekend 'tude in search of true love south of the highway, count the days on one hand that you dug your toes deeply in the sand at Napeague and savored the wee things that scurried for cover in the shallows.
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